


Thief of Time

by polytropic



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Fix-It, M/M, canonical suicidal ideation and depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 02:32:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10732329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: In the fifth scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written, that one day the apprentice Clodpool approached Wen and spake thusly: "Master, what happens when a supervillain with a heart of slightly-tarnished silver and authority issues is given the chance to ask Time for a favor?" And Wen replied, "A fundamental re-organization of the basic precepts of the universe and the nature of causality. Also a happy ending."(Len does Time a favor, and then cashes it in. Not actually a proper Discworld crossover because I only borrowed one character.)





	Thief of Time

There's a game thieves play, during the down time between heists and the giddy high right after. Usually over drinks, sometimes over cards, always tucked into the corner of a bar or pool hall or prison yard. It's a variation on the theme of simple bragging, really, which all criminals engage in as their major form of networking, but the thieves' version has a twist. Most folks, they brag about how many guys they shot up or how big the take was, how many cops showed up to arrest them, even how the victims screamed if they're that kind of psycho. Only the thieves really get down into how fast they did it. In the door, into the safe, how long was the camera loop, how fast did you clear the hallway...that's the game. Len is very, very good at it.

He puts up the best times consistently from about age nineteen onwards. The older thieves, who've already won the game and now sit to the side watching and listening, take notice of that kind of consistent prowess, and it nets him good jobs, better connections. It also nets him enemies, of course, but Len is good at having enemies, well-practiced in it from living with one his whole life. He gets faster, his enemies get iced, Central City becomes, more and more with each job, _his_.

After a gorgeously successful emerald heist, in while he'd managed to shave off fifteen whole seconds from the next best time on that security system, Len's basking in the resentful adulation of his peers when a man, white-haired and holding a cane, sits down next to him. Very quickly, they're alone at the table.

"Hey Archie." Len isn't really into the 'respect your elders' thing, it being one of those lessons he declined to learn and as a result he still doesn't have full range of motion in his left elbow, but he does respect skill. Archie was one of the best, and he's lived to this age by staying that way.

"Leonard." Len has to admit, his given name sounds less stupid in Archie's posh British accent than it does in his own Central City drawl.

"Nice weather we've been having."

"Good for my joints." Len's too, honestly. He's twenty-four, but apparently when you fuck up your bones as a kid, they don't heal so good. His knees crackle just about as bad as Archie's, he's pretty sure. It's annoying. "Heard about your job."

"Yeah." Len contents himself with a smug smile but no elaboration. Archie's heard. It would take away from Len's total and utter victory to belabor the point. "Was fun." Okay maybe just a _little_ more gloating.

"Did you see her?"

Len pauses. Archie's bushy eyebrows are arched, his lined face set. The question was asked absently, but it's somehow important, not vitally so but enough that he's serious about it. 'Her'? Len considers, and then discards, the possibility that Archie might be misinformed about some kind of romantic entanglement; everyone knows Len rarely goes for people who use 'her' pronouns (though he's made exceptions, happily; what's the point of being a criminal if you're going to hold yourself rigidly to self-imposed rules?). Archie doesn't seem remotely urgent or demanding, so it's nothing to do with his wife, or his daughter. There's a possibility that someone has gotten to Lisa, and that would be a shame, because then Len will have to murder a whole bunch of people.

"No one saw me, I didn't see anyone." he says at last, because he hates admitting ignorance but he has no idea what's going on here.

"Mmhm." Archie gives him a significant look that is totally lost on Len. "Guess you're not quite as good as you think you are, huh slick?"

He levers himself to his feet with a grunt and ample assistance from his cane, and stumps away. Len stares after him, thoroughly insulted, and then goes to call Lisa to make doubly sure she's okay. (She's smoking pot with the theatre kids. Close enough.)

It's four more years before he figures out what Archie meant that night. It's his fourth heist with Mick as a real partner, instead of just as that-guy-Len-always-kind-of-wishes-was-here, and it goes...the only way to describe it is sublimely. He moves through the silent halls like a phantom, like _lightning_. This mark is one of the leaders in the realm of data and precious objects security, and their system is brutal at every step, no room for error. Len makes no errors. Len is certain, absolutely certain, that if he wanted to that night he could have placed his hand against the walls and walked right through them, but he didn't because that would ruin the game.

He cracks the safe by hand. Only way; it's got malware in the lock to prevent a hack and any drilling at all will set off so many alarms that Homeland Security would probably show up. So he cracks it, and he does it like a dance, like a song whose sheet music he saw for the first time tonight and played flawlessly.

And at the exact moment when the tumblers fall into place, in that perfect suspended silence of victory after the click, she appears.

She is both quite small, and endlessly large. There is blue in the air around her, an icy sparkling blue that looks like the blood you would find if you pulled up the universe's skin. She looks a little like Lisa somehow, though her hair and skin are both darker, and perhaps that is why Len feels an impact inside of him at the sight of her, at how her hair floats around her head and how she is very, very sad.

 _Leonard Snart._ Her mouth moves, but it's like the words are the wrong audio file: they don't seem to quite match up, and his ears didn't so much hear them as they just...were in his memory as having been spoken.

"Who wants to know?" he says.

_You are a thief._

"Uh, I'm a _great_ thief, thanks."

 _Good. Steal me_.

He wrinkles his nose. "...you're not my type."

There is a swoop in his perception, dizzy and sickening, and he sees...well, honestly, he has no idea what he's looking at. Some kind of pool, or bathtub? It's in a dark cavernous room, and the water inside is the same glittering blue as the highlights of the woman's hair.

"That you?" he asks, because he's not stupid, she's clearly not human and she _could_ be a pool, like those Greek myths where women were streams or whatever.

 _That is a cage. It holds me_.

That didn't exactly explain anything to Len, but with that sentence he also gets a...feeling, he supposes, an intuition prickling in the back of his throat and along his spine. It's familiar. Sometimes cages are invisible. Sometimes they're hard to explain. Sometimes they hold you so tight you can't breathe or think, and yet you walk around in the world looking to everyone else like you're free.

"I'm in. Where's the job." Mick will understand. Len will pitch it as the next big challenge, or something. These people who have her held will probably have something valuable, right? And if nothing else, Mick can blow the damn thing up and that'll make him happy.

_Promise. Promise me._

And Leonard Snart does not do promises, definitely does not fall for the damsel-in-distress act considering how often he's seen Lisa utilize it to devastating effect, so he can't really explain why his voice sticks a couple of times but then barks out, too harsh, "I promise."

Then he's back in front of the safe, hearing the fading echo of the 'click' in his ears, and all that's left is this feeling, a bright blue rushing like something huge and incredible just happened, and like he's the best damn thief on Earth.

Len opens the safe, pockets the merchandise, clears the scene, and in the getaway car leans over and kisses Mick because all that adrenaline has to go _somewhere_ and he's been wanting to for years.

Len's life goes on, along its track: a track he will defend to his grave and beyond as _his choice_ , dammit. This pre-determination bullshit is so fucking _Calvinist_ , Len's Jewish sensibilities are offended. 

He doesn't remember, or think about, that one strange night again until he's on the Waverider, having narrowly escaped yet another Rip Hunter Made a Decision shitshow, and first hears the word "Oculus."

Then it comes back. Well, not...back, not really. It's not that it hadn't happened until that moment, more like it....was going to have happened and at the same time would have not happened by the time it was going to have...nope, nope, done, the minute Len feels the edges of a headache from trying to conceptualize this shit he's out. People like Rip can contemplate the vagaries of how to grammatically describe the non-linear nature of time; probably he needs questions like that to distract him from the view he gets with his head that far up his ass. Len has better things to do.

Like, apparently, saving Time herself, because she asked him to.

She didn't mention the price he'd have to pay. No one ever does, Len should know that by now. Ray Palmer's life, Len would pay happily; it's not his to give away, but then again, _thief_. It's what he does. But Mick takes his place, and isn't that just like him? He always fights Len's new plans until the last goddamn moment and then changes his mind and goes in on them 200%. Len didn't expect his usual reversal to extend to the damn 'hero' bit. He should have. He should know by now that Mick Rory's greatest talent is fucking up Leonard Snart's life by giving him exactly what he asked for. 

So then Len ends up paying, for once, out of his own pocket. His own time.

The explosion is ice-blue and glorious. It's all he could have hoped for.

Waking up, or at least regaining consciousness of some kind, afterwards is _more_ than he hoped for. He doesn't open his eyes because that kind of embodied language is distinctly irrelevant, but he...accesses the ability to perceive things, and sees blue, endless, sparkling kind of like snow does in the dawn light, when everything looks like a Russian fairytale.

 _Thank you_ , the blue says. It's her voice, the one from all those years ago, and he wishes he still had a body so he could shiver. He's inside her, he realizes abruptly, which is kind of upsetting because Len is very choosy about the people he allows the kind of intimacy that phrase implies.

"You could have bought me dinner first," he says, because he compensates with humor.

 _I don't understand_. He thinks at first that of course she doesn't, how could the theoretical construct of time know what sex is, but then it's like clarity filters in from where the blue brushes his body-that's-not-a-body, and he realizes: she doesn't understand because he's always _been_ inside her. They all are. It's like objecting to the air for touching his lungs.

"You're welcome," he says belatedly. She doesn't care that it's disjointed, out-of-order; that phrase has no meaning for her. She does care, and is happy, that he means it.

 _I flow_. He feels her joy, and her relief. Personally, Len kind of likes it when things are neat and frozen, caught still so they can't act unpredictably around him and he can take them apart at his leisure. But for a creature that cannot die, the stultification the Oculus imposed on Time seems to have felt a whole lot like death.

"I...don't, any more, do I. I'm dead." He's testing the theory as he says it, and somehow he feels the truth of it: he's dead. His body is gone. However he's existing now, it's not life. He doesn't get that any more. Well, shit.

"That's not acceptable." That's not fair, he wants to say, but he hasn't been able to get out a phrase that credulous without laughing since he was about twelve. "I saved you; you owe me."

 _You saved me_ , she agrees. He's going to take that as acquiescence. 

"I want to live."

 _You do live_. The voice, despite not actually being made of sound, has a clear tone of puzzlement. Flashes of himself slide through Len's perception: him as a child, the history he remembers, but also other histories, versions of himself he doesn't remember being, mayors and dictators and artists and...an accountant? Oh, Earth-17 self, _no_.

He understands that, to her, these pieces of his time are all the same. To him, they're all behind him or adjacent to him, and the fact that there's nothing ahead is intolerable; to her those arrangements are illusions. He lives because he has lived, tense irrelevant.

He doesn't know how to explain why it matters so much to him to live past this moment.

He has a thought, and without him needing to voice it, the timestream complies and shows him Mick and Lisa. He can't quite tell which images are their alternate selves and which ones are their futures, things he hasn't seen yet.

"They go on without me."

 _Yes._ A muddle of images again, of every moment that he's been apart from them. (Many of those absences are his fault, which Time tactfully isn't mentioning but is pretty clear when it's laid out like this.) He understands, without her saying it, that she again doesn't see why the seventeen years Mick spent on Earth before Len met him are different than the--holy shit, _what_ ? The _over five hundred years_ he'll live after Len's death?

"What the--"

The Time Masters. Of course Kronos was long-lived, why would they leave their bounty hunter with a human lifespan? That...that changes everything. Len wants to live, of course he does, but his partner isn't going to spend half a millennium without him, either. That's not happening.

He knows now how to ask for what he wants.

"You see their time? Mick and Lisa?"

 _Yes_. She sees all of it.

"I want it. Whenever they exist, I want to be able to exist as well. Any time they are, I get to be, too."

 _You love them_.

Since when did this conversation become about feelings? Len signed up to save the metaphysical anthropomorphization of space-time, not to talk about his feelings.

"Yes," he says, grudgingly.

 _You want to possess them_.

"Well, when you put it that way it sounds creepy." He's not going to deny it, though.

 _I understand that kind of love_. Barry Allen speeds past in Len's mind's eye, a bolt of red and gold. Time reaches out and brushes her thin fingers down his face; he shivers, as if he can feel her, and runs faster.

Wow, okay. Len's not touching that little revelation with a ten-foot pole, thanks.

 _Your payment is granted_.

 

He doesn't get it right the first time he tries it. He figures he'll drop in on Mick while he's still with the Legends, since they did see him die first-hand and that tends to be traumatizing for people with delicate constitutions (i.e. Mr. Palmer). He aims for a month after his death, because sooner seems like emotional whiplash territory, but instead he….well. He kind of ends up, there's no better word for it than _smeared_ , across what feels like at least seven or eight months of Legends missions, of Mick drinking, Mick eating, Mick fighting, Mick…

Mick wanting to die.

Len sees it clearly, existing simultaneously (and messily) as he does in every moment Mick does for over half a year: Mick is trying to get himself killed. He's not quite at the point where he'll actively off himself, though Len can see him itch to occasionally, sees him mark out secluded spots that look just right for a final blaze of glory as they travel through time. But stepping out in front of bullets? Starting fights he can't win? Mick is baiting death, beckoning to it.

Len is panicked enough about that realization that he pulls himself together, drags himself through the syrupy mess he's made of that portion of the timestream, and manages to manifest.

Mick thinks he's a hallucination. That may have something to do with the fact that Len pops up looking slightly otherworldly, delivers a bitchy lecture about not getting his damn fool self killed, and then disappears back into the timestream. Several times. Whoops.

Dr. Stein tells Mick that Len is a manifestation of his own doubts about his role on the team. This is what you get when you ask a physicist to do psychology: Dr. Phil bullshit. (Len doesn't blame Mick for trying, though: Stein is apparently an expert in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, neuroscience, and astronomy, so why _not_ psychology, really?) He's a little better after that conversation, at least, though Len's not sure if it's the scolding he delivered or Stein's psychobabble. Either way, Mick starts bowing out of missions, clearly doesn't trust himself and his death wish in the field.

Len watches, but he can't seem to manage the whole 'physical body' schtick again. There's gotta be some trick to it, because he did it before, but somehow now he can't repeat the effect. He's getting a little concerned, even though existential angst isn't his deal, that he may have been body-less for long enough that he's forgotten how to have one.

That is, until the Legion of Doom--okay you can't just pick a supervillain team name like that. It takes actual _thought_ , you have to establish a _brand_ , Len is something of an expert in this area and he's _crushingly_ embarrassed for these assholes--decides that their next fucking brilliant play is going to be to enlist Len. Well, _a_ Len.

They pluck Len from 2014. They get him to buy in. And they set him on Mick.

Paltry concerns like 'what if I'm disembodied forever?' and 'what's the definition of living, really?' fall away under a mindset that is much more Len's style. Namely:

You don't use him. You don't crank him up like a little windup toy and point him at the target. And you sure as _hell_ don't slap his face onto a shitty plan and a shittier objective just to fuck with his partner.

Len backs up along Mick's timeline fifteen years or so, just to get a good running start, and slingshots himself through time. He speeds through the years, Mick's life his runway, and by the time he hits he's burning blue all over, great ribbony plumes of time boiling off his shoulders like steam. Conveniently, the entire Legion has decided to stand very still in one place, all holding the Spear of Destiny.

Len hits the spear like a guided missile made of temporal energy and offended fury.

In the wake of the explosion, Len finds himself standing, steaming slightly, at the epicenter of a massive scorch mark, with fallen bodies and shattered fragments of the Spear of Destiny littered around him. He flexes his newly-corporeal hands and reflect that he's really starting to like these blue explosions of his, though the Legion may not feel the same.

"My bad," Len tells Mick's unconscious body. He makes sure Mick's pulse is nice and steady, props his head up on a rolled-up jacket so he doesn't get a crick in his neck when he wakes up, and then gets down to business.

First, his past self; Len is a slightly lost on how to return him to where he belongs, but it turns out to be a moot question, because the minute Len prods himself with his foot there's an odd sucking sensation and then the other him is gone. Okay, cool, timeline anomaly fixed, apparently.

Second, the speedster. Len crouches down over the unconscious Eobard Thawne and takes a quick selfie, just for posterity's sake. Len is currently 2 for 4 against Barry Allen, after all, but with this he's now 3 for 5 against speedsters as a category, which counts as a winning record. Gotta have some proof of his victory to send to Scarlet, and of course Lisa too. Maybe to some newspapers. Mick got a Presidential Commendation, Len has to catch up.

On that note, Len ties up Thawne and the other members of the Legion, props them all up against a wall, and takes another photo. Does the Flash have a photo with two members of the League of Assassins that he took out single-handedly? No, no he does not. Winner, Leonard 'Captain Cold' 'Also now possibly Captain Time and in need of a better additional nickname' Snart.

Then he goes and makes himself a sandwich in the ensuite kitchen off behind the imposing weapons locker areas of the secret lair, because turns out not having a body for the better part of a year makes a man a mite hungry.

When Mick wakes up, Len is sitting next to him eating his second sandwich and idly watching the spear slowly put itself back together fragment by shattered fragment. It looks about half done, to him, but it's also getting faster the more of its mass it gets all in one place. Kind of creepy, really, though Len has always found Christian iconography weird. So much blood and tears and other gross bodily fluids; give him a good golem or goblin any day over all this goyishe shit.

"Hey, next time can we find the reality-warping all-powerful artifacts from _my_ religion? I mean, I know Jesus was Jewish, but still," he says.

Mick gives him a baffled look. Len hands him the third sandwich. Mick turns his baffled look on the sandwich, the spear, the still-unconscious Legion, and then back on Len again.

"This your plan all along?" he mumbles.

"...yes," Len says, firmly.

"Bullshit." Mick sits up, then groans, a hand going to his head.

"It could've been!" Len insists, and then just barely manages to get a hand on Mick's back before he topples over backwards again. Apparently the Spear of Destiny packs quite a punch when it explodes.

The warmth of Mick's back sinks into his palm. Len didn't miss feeling, not really; he wasn't without it that long, subjectively speaking. But he missed feeling Mick, apparently. Not to be maudlin about it or anything.

Mick glances at Len's face when he doesn't immediately remove his hand, then does a double-take and looks longer. Len wrinkles his nose and takes his hand back, but it's too late, Mick is doing that thing where he reads Len's mind in his microexpressions or whatever. He has a gift for being annoyingly perceptive at the most obnoxious possible times.

"Look like you've seen a ghost. And I know what I'm talkin' about, there," Mick says, and when Len winces at that, scowls and fists a hand in the front of his shirt. "Lenny. What the hell ain't you telling me."

"Many things," Len drawls. Mick shakes him, a little like a large dog with a recalcitrant puppy. Why did Len even miss this asshole.

"You're gonna tell me right now what's going on, what happened with the spear, why you're lookin' at me like that, and why some of your grey bits have gone blue--" they have? _Shit_! "--or so help me Lenny I'm gonna haul you back to the Waverider, put you in a chair, and use the Time Masters' mind-reading doohickey to find out myself." 

Len sighs. "Fine. Fine! Shut up and listen, then."

By the time he's done with the story, Mick has eaten his sandwich and the spear has fixed itself fully and is shining in front of them, somehow contriving to look enticing. Len watches the play of light along its blade, because the alternative is watching Mick's face, and sure they're partners and have sex and Len might have used the 'L' word once or twice in particularly foolish moments, but eye contact now feels a little too vulnerable all the same.

"If you'd've just told me the plan going in, I coulda been ready at the Oculus," Mick says, finally. Len inclines his head.

"Not wrong."

"You gonna tell me shit _before_ it ruins the plan, next time?"

"Probably not."

"Yeah." Mick sighs, long and low, and tips his head back a little to look up at the ceiling, rolling his shoulders restlessly. "Been thinkin'." He pauses, as if to give Len time to make a joke about that. That's an instinct learned from time with the Legends, right there. Len lets the silence stretch, hoping his point is made for him with his lack of response. Mick darts a glance at him, looks thoughtful, then continues. "You know anyone else with a partner? A real one, I mean, like you 'n me."

"...no. No one," Len admits. Criminals trust no one, and heros all seem to work in (dysfunctional) teams. Len supposes normal people may form partnerships, but he's not what one would call _experienced_ in the ways of ordinary folks.

"Me neither. Stein's married, you know. Haircut was, too."

"So? My _dad_ was married. Twice. Doesn't mean anything."

"Yeah. 'S what I mean. This?" Mick gestures awkwardly between himself and Len with one large hand, eyes still fixed on the spear. "Ain't real common, I think. Maybe something we should keep in mind more often."

Holy shit, Mick _really missed him_. Len swallows, hard, and then swallows again when that didn't quite buy him enough time to figure out something to say.

"Uh. Yeah. Yeah, good...good point," he chokes out, finally. Not cool, not cool at all, Len. He glances at the unconscious Legion of Doom. If any of them heard that, heard any of this conversation actually, Len is going to have three ugly, overly-manscaped ice statues added to this secret lair's decor.

But since they still appear to be unconscious, Len awkwardly shuffles his butt sideways until he and Mick are pressed together, side to side. Mick freezes, startled, and then leans into him. They stay like that for a while, not talking.

It's a groan from Damien Darkh that finally breaks the silence. Len glances at the captive Legion, then sighs and gets to his feet with a creaking protest of his knees. Dying and having his body reconstituted from the essence of time itself didn't fix his joint problems, which seems unfair in retrospect.

He saunters over to the trio of wannabe-supervillains and kicks Thawne in the head to make sure he stays out. Can't keep up with a speedster once he's conscious, not without his gun at least. The other two he lets wake, so he can gloat.

"You! You...sabotaged the spear? How?" Darkh gasps when he's fully conscious. Len smirks.

"Skill. Guess you're just not in my _league_." Behind him Mick snorts, the particular tone he adopts when Len makes an especially egregious pun.

"Impossible. You're a thug from the slums, you couldn't wield a mystical artifact if your life depended on it."

"Good thing yours does, instead." Len whistles jauntily as he walks over to the spear, just for that extra little edge of 'I'm free and super powerful, you're tied up and screwed.' It means he has to turn his back on the Legion, but that's fine, Mick's here. He's got Len's back, always.

It's about time Len started properly returning the favor.

He flicks the spear into the air with his foot--look, Len is from the Central City _block_ , okay, he can juggle a soccer ball for _hours_ \--catches it, and takes a moment to savor the weight of it, the power he can feel humming under its surface. It whispers to him, dreams of gold and glory and conquest.

Then he offers it to Mick.

Mick looks at him like he's a ghost, again.

"What? You said you had changes you wanted to make." Len shoves the spear a little more firmly towards his partner. Mick reaches out, uncharacteristically hesitantly. He's usually very grabby with gifts.

"You don't?" Mick has deigned to put a hand on the spear's shaft, but he still isn't taking its weight, looking at Len like he might snatch the thing back.

"It's not like it's one-use-only, right? Come on. You stole it, it's your haul." Len lets go, so Mick has to catch the spear or let it hit the ground. He catches it, and then stares at its shining blade with wide eyes.

"You sure?"

"Yes." Having seen how Mick's been the last few months, and how he's been left out of decisions through a combination of his own refusal to engage and the Legends underestimating him, Len supposes this weird crisis of confidence isn't unreasonable. It does piss him off a little, though; not at Mick, but for him. Before all this shit, it was _years_ since Mick hesitated at making his own choices, at taking charge when Len handed over the reins or he demanded them. They've lost a lot, thanks to Len's stupid idea that time travel might be fun.

"Are you an idiot? You've handed ultimate cosmic power to that moron?" yells Malcolm the Marlin, or whatever. Len rolls his eyes.

"Seriously, these guys are such a waste of time, let's do something more interesting please." Mick nods. "Oh, uh. One thing though?"

"Yeah?" Mick looks wary.

Len tries to think of how to phrase this.

"Don't...don't change yourself, okay?" Ugh, nope, that came out wrong and also like a Babysitter's Club book moral. Backpedal, backpedal! "'less you wanna change your snoring, that can go."

Now Mick just looks baffled. Len grits his teeth and figures there's no way through but forward at this point.

"I mean. I know you wanna fix...the fire. Your parents, and shit. I get it, it's cool. But you don't have to...you don't gotta change you to change that, okay? Not if you don't want to. Not even the pyro part. You should keep it. If you want."

Mick stares at Len, mouth open. Len seriously considers just ducking back into the timestream in mortification.

"Okay, never mind. New plan. Use the spear to make it so I never said anything just now, thanks."

"Nope." Mick's has slowly transitioned from confused, to stunned, and now appears to have settled on 'massive, shit-eating grin that Len's can't quite interpret the cause of.' Len suspects he is being mocked, which would only be fair after that torrent of ridiculous inanity he just spewed everywhere.

"Fine, hold it over my head, just remember revenge is a dish best served c--"

They're kissing. Why is Mick kissing him? Not that Len is against it--the opposite, really, as soon as he understands what's going on he gives back as good as he gets. Unfortunately by the time they break for air, Len digging his fingers into Mick's forearms and Mick leaving a last bite on his lower lip, Len doesn't have enough breath left to ask what the hell that was about.

"Won't change you, either. Would never, not even your dumb puns," Mick promises, and Len hisses and has to drag him back in again because he _gets_ it, what Len was trying to say, like he always does when Len can't manage the stupid words.

"Aw, that's weirdly sweet," says Malcolm.

...Len totally forgot they were watching. They must die now.

" _Mick_ \--"

"On it boss."

Mick tugs him close. Len plants a hand on the spear as Mick starts to chant. There is a rising light, gold fading to pure white. The world changes.

**Author's Note:**

> I just really love Terry Pratchett a lot you guys?? The entire first half of this story is just an inferior re-write of the Pratchett book of the same name; Leonard Snart is no Nanny Ogg, but he is a damn good thief, and that carries some weight as these things go I think. 
> 
> Also, I borrowed Archie from Leverage briefly? I felt like he fit in that scene.
> 
> I wanted to leave what Mick decides to do with the spear totally open, but if anyone has ideas and wants to continue it, feel free to post a related work!


End file.
